Task grammar and attitude

This paper investigates the ability of perceivers to form impressions of tasks as part of the process of forming a task attitude. This ability is described as being partly given by a syntactic grammar that specifies both the primitive elements of tasks and the rules that structure these elements to form meaningful task impressions. The proposed grammar is shown to generate representations of task structure that can be mapped readily onto task attitudes. The paper concludes with a discussion of the implications of task grammar for research on task attitudes.